In her contribution to the commentary series on technocracy and democracy in global governance organised by the Global Governance Centre and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Sapna Reheem Shaila, Research Associate at the Department of Law, University of Edinburgh, argues that we must pay close attention to the varying strategies experts take for legitimising their roles in different local settings.

Who is an expert, what expertise does the expert provide, how does the expert apply their expertise? – these aspects can vary depending on the policy area and settings under study. In the context of global governance initiatives on the rule of law and human rights, scholars identify experts as the “technocrats” who frequent the boardrooms and the council rooms of powerful multilateral/bilateral organisations negotiating and perfecting provisions and clauses of international declarations, identifying legal issue areas, meticulously planning how the identified issues can be tackled globally through certain standard legal solutions, and monitoring how societies are complying with the set standards. 

Here, by drawing on the scholarship on rule-of-law experts and their expertise in local contexts, I would like to put forward some tentative observations and arguments. At the outset, my arguments resonate with Johan Christensen’s observations on why need more contextual studies on experts and why it is necessary to pay attention to the mechanisms through which experts forge their influence.

At the international level, certain groups of actors emerge as the “experts”– through multiple instances of contestations, conflicts and recursive engagements. They chart out a field of expertise and shape perceptions about expected normative standards and behaviours associated with the area globally. Simion and Taylor’s study on rule-of-law professionals perhaps provides us with a tangible example to contextualise this phenomenon. The authors show how a group of individuals with similar educational and professional histories have resorted to a cluster of conceptual ideas and solutions under the umbrella of rule of law, which has been exported to different countries as part of rule-of-law reforms.

Although the commonly perceived problems and solutions are debated, deliberated and devised at the international level, the subjects and objects of these global governance solutions are situated far from the sites where the decisions are formulated. Away from the international sites, in the field, the experts are often the program managers, technical advisers, and monitoring and evaluation consultants, who act as channels for transferring expert knowledge and solutions formulated at the international level to local settings. But to bring changes or to ensure that targeted communities adopt technical solutions established internationally, experts must work towards finding ways to legitimise the applicability of such solutions to fit local realities and the needs of the targeted population. Experts may have the legal and technical solutions to address social issues, but citizens and the political elite often have the upper hand in deciding and determining the trajectories of change for a particular society. 

Thus, as Johan Christensen points out in his piece, experts are just “one type of actor that provides input in the political system and competes with other actors for influence.” Acknowledging this reality in which experts operate underscores why we must pay close attention to the varying strategies experts take for legitimising their roles in different local settings.

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